Analysis of computing systems and, more specifically servers, with respect to security and performance has proven to be extremely useful to development requirements and to the design of such systems. As such, it can be particularly advantageous to incorporate security and performance engineering and analysis from the beginning stages of design. Conventionally, the design of systems lacks security engineering and analysis thereby prompting retroactive measures to address identified security attacks and issues.
Today, when developing a computing system, it is oftentimes difficult to protect the server and to predict how the server will react under real-world conditions. In other words, it is difficult to predict security vulnerabilities of a server prior to and during development and/or before completion. Frequently, a developer will have to address threats and attacks to a server that occur under real-world conditions and threats of attacks. This retroactive troubleshooting can consume many hours of developer time—which is very expensive.
Traditionally, designing for server security is oftentimes random and does not produce effective results. As a result, servers are left vulnerable to threats and uninvited attacks. In most cases, the typical developer lacks the expertise to effectively predict vulnerabilities and associated attacks.
While some threats and attacks can be estimated with some crude level of certainty, others cannot. For those security criterions that can be estimated prior to development, this estimate most often requires a great amount of research and guesswork in order to most accurately determine the criterion. The conventional guesswork approach of security analysis is not based upon any founded benchmark. As well, these conventional approaches are not effective or systematic in any way.
Rather, conventional security approaches are based upon a trial-and-error mechanism. In other words, traditional systems tend to be reactive as developers lack the expertise necessary to formulate a proactive security mechanism. As such, these traditional trial-and-error approaches lead to costly interruptions and expensive developer time in order to rectify issues as they arise.
In summary, traditional computing system development approaches do not proactively (and accurately) address security issues related to the server. To the contrary, developers often find themselves addressing security and performance issues after the fact—after development is complete. This retroactive modeling approach is extremely costly and time consuming to the development of computing systems.